One of the more popular website features is pop up galleries. There are at least two ways to do this. We’ll look at the easy way first and for those more creative and adventurous readers, we’ll look at the harder but more impressive way later. OK. Here’s a photo of my adorable cat, Chloe (a remarkable cat in every way). I simply dragged the image from the desktop onto the page. Now it is ready to be made into a pop-up. The first step is to physically reduce the size of the image to a thumbnail. The resolution at this size is over 600dpi. The larger version is 240dpi. Windows screen display is 96dpi so this is really overkill. But we will address this issue in a moment. Click the globe icon to open the Web Properties options and click on Image Properties. With the photo selected and the Image section of Web Properties  open, check Pop-up Photo, set the Pop-up Width you want for the pop- up photo, add an Image Caption (optional), and select JPEG or PNG. PNG is best for graphics or images with large areas of solid color, and/or text though it will create a larger file size. JPEG is best for photos (it says that doesn’t it?), and 75 for Quality is a good balance of image quality to file size. If you need higher quality for your image then a setting between 80-90 is good. But preview the image at different settings. 75 is usually ideal. When you are done press Apply. Whenever you see an Apply button, remember to press it or your changes will not be applied. Clicking OK often just closes the dialog but does not apply the changes. Click here Click the photo to see the pop-up. Notice I have added a Wall Shadow to the thumbnail. This will also appear behind the pop-up photo. You can see the caption we added as well. If you add a bevel to the thumbnail, the pop-up will also have a bevel. If you crop the photo, the pop-up will likewise be cropped. It is all so logical. Yes? There is a lot you can do with captions, including formatting the text and making the caption scroll. Steve Ledger covers this in Workbook 84. Pop-ups can also be vector objects, which as you may know, scale up to any size without losing detail or sharpness. You can use pop-ups to get your visitor to see something like the tiny type in the middle of this vector image. Click here You can create a cool gallery by creating some evenly-spaced rectangles like those shown above, then dragging and dropping images onto each of the rectangles. (Hold down the Shift key as you drop the image onto the rectangle unless it already contains a photo). You can create an easy and effective slide show by clicking on the Options button in the Image section and selecting your options. The results of these settings are shown below. Click on any thumbnail to start the slide show. There are two things you astute readers will see in the slide show: the images are not centered in the middle of the page, and after all the slides have been shown, every other image on the page becomes part of the slide show. Ack! Ack indeed! Unless the only images on your page are for your slide show, this could appear to be a major gaff. If you want to center the slide show images on the page, just add the script below to the body section of a placeholder on the page: <script type="text/javascript">hs.align = "center";</script> You can prevent other graphics on the page from becoming part of your slide show by naming each image NoHighSlide To do this, select all of the non-slide show images, press the yellow Names tag icon, enter NoHighSlide and press Add. How easy was that? There is another way to show pop-up images that I prefer to the HighSlide pop-ups. Call me a snob, but I just don’t like the HighSlide Pop-ups. My technique requires a small investment in time but produces a more customized result. My method simply uses links to pop-up layers, A pop-up layer is just a new named layer in the Page and Layer Gallery that you create and on which you place your images, text, videos, what have you. The screen shot above shows five new pop-up layers I just created for this page, named appropriately, pop-up-1, etc. You can give the new layers any name you want, especially if it helps you remember what is on each layer. The dark gray shape on the right will be pasted in place on each layer and will display different content when the visitor mouses over any of the numbered buttons. The content can be a photo, a graphic, text, or a combination of any or all of these. Right now nothing is linked and there is no content. You can modify this technique any way you want and the options are endless. Buttons are linked via the Mouse-Over > Show Pop-up Layer to the five pop-up layers Mouse over the buttons You can also use the standard Link > Pop-up Layer option in which case you need a button to close the pop-up. It can be a simple red square with an X. You need to name (the yellow Names tag icon) the button popup:close. For button 6, I applied a Fade transition effect to a new Pop-up Layer (which creates a soft fade in for the image. Right click on any layer and select Layer Properties > Web Transition. These transitions can be very effective if not overused. Button linked via the Link > Pop-up Layer option Fade Effect applied to this layer Once you have created your page and all of your images are the size you want them, from the Utilities  menu, select Optimize all JPEGs. This reduces the resolution for all of your images to 96dpi, Windows screen resolution, and greatly reduces the file size of your web site document. It does not effect the images in the browser as these are automatically reduced to 96dpi upon publishing.